Gore Vidal Quotes

There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

I was an only child until I was 14, and there were no other kids around the area really. So I spent a lot of time on my own in the fields or by the lake, with just my imagination for company. I suppose I never wanted to let that part of me go.

My sister is older than me and would often go off, so I grew up alone in a sense. I had to amuse myself and developed a wonderful fantasy world and quite happily lived in it. I think, in adulthood, that helped me. I love pottering on my own.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

I think that all the time I lived alone changed me.

I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

The greater the spirit, the more one is alone.

You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been - alone, As all must be, I said within my heart, Whether they work together or apart.

Death is loneliness in its purest form.

Alone I'm nothing.

It's only when you're alone that you realize where you are. You have nothing to fall back on except your own resources.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

What I was reading was already part of my psyche, but finally someone else was saying it's okay to walk alone.

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

You know, that single girl life and that sense of isolation - that doesn't leave you just like that. And that's what that song is about. I remember that, and that is imprinted on me, that sense.

I don't collaborate. You're born alone, you die alone, you get on stage alone.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.